Camp Routines

I'm in the Seychelles and...

 • I have to check my bed for blister bugs

 • My uniform is a bikini and I haven't worn shoes in weeks

 • I'll take an hour and half trip to use the internet

    The schedule here is pretty tight and there's not much time for faffing about. A typical day goes something like this, breakfast is at 6am, there's usually a lecture after that and the first dive goes out at 7:30am. We dekit and change tanks on the boat so we can go out for a second dive soon after that and are back in the bay by 10:30am. Lunch is at 11:30am and the afternoons are reserved for camp duties. Those who were doing duties in the morning kit up and go out for their dives in the afternoon. I don't know why but I'm always on morning dives (it's suddenly going to change now that I've said that). Dinner is at 18:30pm, the nightly meeting at 19:30pm and it's to bed shortly after that!

   Each week new groups are chosen and duties are assigned for the different days. The four duty chunks are “Kitchen, Grounds, Tanks, and Boat.” If you're on kitchen, well that's pretty obvious what your group does that day. Grounds duty includes scrubbing the bathrooms and sweeping the pathways and dorms. Tanks duty is running the compressor to fill up our diving tanks and hauling the tanks from the compressor to the kit room. I prefer to be sat at the compressor filling tanks than hauling them up the hill! And when on Boat duty your group has to load up the trailer with the boat gear such as gasoline and our survey equipment. Then the trailer is taken down to the bay and the gear put on the boat. You also help out the captain as the Boat Biatch for the day.

   I've started my practice survey diving and my buddy and I are working quite well together. We're the furthest along in the training and I think we may be starting to do real survey's next week. To do the survey dives we have to lay a 50 meter tape along the bottom following a bearing given by the captain. We are given a specific depth we have to cross, called the magic number. So the captain will tell us “no shallower than 2.5, cross 6 and no deeper than 16 meters” That means that we can lay our tape at 5.9 and finish at 6.1 or lay our tape from 2.5 and finish at 15.9 meters – depending on the reef. Once the tape is laid we swim on opposite sides of the tape 2.5meters away and back, zig zagging up the tape. This means our survey covers 5x50meters of the reef. We have underwater slates that we record every coral we see. If we see the same coral twice we don't need to record it again.

   This week we had a special day on Wednesday. Five of us were selected to help out the Underwater Center in Beau Vallon. It was a PADI Project AWARE; Dive the Earth Day; Clean up Dive. The main aim of our dives was to kill the invasive species killing the reef – the ugly Crown of Thorns. This twenty armed sea star eats coral and without intervention will lead to the destruction of entire coral gardens. The only things that eat the Crown of Thorns have been overfished, resulting in massive CofT population outbreaks. Members from GVI, MCSS, Seychelles Fisheries and other organizations that utilize and value the coral reefs banned together today and assisted in the dives. We used long metal 'swords' to spear the CofT and bring them up to the boat where they are DNA tested before being shipped off to the landfill. We managed to collect 21 animals and picked up a fair amount of garbage in the reef. Hurrah!

   We've seen Whalesharks! This week some members of our group were fortunate enough to spot them while diving. Because I was on the Crown of Thorns Cull I wasn't one of the lucky ones. However, only four people actually saw them and I'm sure the people who'd been diving at that site and didn't see them are more envious than I am. I'm still here for many more weeks, so I'm confident I'll see them here too. At least we've spotted them in the bay now!!